How Do Bloggers Make Money?

14 Ways to Replace Your Day Job Income with Blogging

Whenever someone is first introduced to the world of blogging, invariably the first question is “How do bloggers make money?”

They want to know how writing articles and posting them on a webpage can turn into cash. It is a fair question for sure. After all, if you are not familiar with the concept at all, then you wonder if it is a legitimate way to earn an online income.

Before I dive into the types of income streams that bloggers can create, it can be extremely beneficial to think through the goals, passions and struggles of your ideal audience. Once you understand the audience you want to serve, you’ll have a better idea which of the following income streams work best.

How Do You Make Money Blogging?

The 2 Types of Blogging Income

1. Low Maintenance Passive Income – This is really the most ideal type of income because it can provide you and your family with freedom. This is most often recurring passive income streams that you can enjoy. This type of money happens without your personal involvement. It is scale-able.

Meaning that you can earn money without exchanging time for money in the moment. Some examples would include Google Adsense (or any paid for clicks campaign), membership sites, selling advertisement space, affiliate marketing sales, and even ebook sales.

If you can get paid for something while you are sleeping and it does not require you to exchange future time for money, then you have a low maintenance passive income stream.

The individual transactions are smaller but they happen more often and don’t require your time. Every morning when I wake up I can log into my Google Adsense account and see that I made money while I was sleeping.

2. Personal Involvement High Income – The idea with this strategy is that if something involves your personal time, it should cost more. After all, your time should be valuable to you, right?

If you offer personal consulting for your niche you should charge what your personal time is worth to you. It also matters the type of reach that you are able to get as well.

For example, you do not have to charge as much for a webinar with 100 participants as you might with a personal consultation. You would charge even more for live speaking events as well.

The ideal strategy would be to set up low maintenance passive income streams that meet your household budget, so that you can spend your time in higher income events that require personal involvement. To be honest each have their benefits.

Passive income streams allow you to enjoy the freedom to use your time how you choose. Personal involvement income ideas allow you to interact with others and make a difference in other people.

14 Ways to Replace Your Day Job Income with Blogging

Here are some ways that bloggers make money. I won’t be able to go into great detail on how each of these work, nor have I used every one of these to make money.

Some bloggers only focus on how to do 2 or 3 of these really well, while others try to add as many of these as possible to their income buckets. I like to try and master one and then move to the next once I get a handle on one. Also, visit our Make Money page as we are constantly adding new income ideas for you.

Our goal is to make this page the ultimate resource for bloggers who want to earn income.

1. Pay Per Click Ads

How does this work? Anytime someone clicks on your ads, you earn money. The most popular is Google Adsense. On average clicks earn between .15-.50 cents per click, but I have personally seen as much as $5.00 for a click.

2. Affiliate Marketing

How does this work? There are many, many services and products online that you can partner up with at no cost to you. When people click on your personalized link and buy something, that company credits you with the sale.

Average commissions can range from 15-75% of the sale price. There are even recurring affiliate commission programs that you can get involved in that will pay you over and over again for making just one sale.

3. CPM Advertising Networks

How Does This Work? You earn income just from the traffic that you receive and the exposure that advertisers receive. In other words, your traffic does not have to click on anything for you to earn money. You earn money by just displaying your ads. You need a lot of traffic to really see the benefit here but you can typically expect to receive between 20 cents to a few dollars for every 1000 pageviews.

4. Job Boards

How does this work? You can earn income a few different ways using job boards on your blog. You can sell your own job advertisements if you want. You can earn between $100-300 a month by listing jobs. You can also earn income per click as people use your job board to apply for jobs that are listed on the world wide web. These jobs come from employer job boards and larger sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.

5. Kindle Book Publishing

It’s never been easier for you to write and publish a book. Amazon makes this process extremely easy. You don’t have to wait for permission. You don’t have to submit a book proposal and wait for acceptance. You simply write your passion and publish it for the world to see and buy. We teach a 30-day process for publishing your kindle book called Kindle Your Passion.

6. Self-Published Print Book

While there are certain advantages to going with a traditional publisher, you can self-publish a great looking physical book. With a service like CreateSpace, you can convert your Amazon Kindle book into a physical book. Amazon will even sell your physical book for you without you having to carry the inventory yourself.

7. Audio Book

It is also very easy today to take a book you’ve written and convert it into an audiobook. With a service like Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) you can either hire a voice talent to read your audio book or you can do it yourself. Once completed, your audiobook can be for sale right next to your book on Amazon.

8. Online Course

Compiling your knowledge into an online course is a smart strategy most bloggers are not taking advantage of today. After creating over ten online courses to date, it’s my number one strategy for passive, recurring income. We have a complete online course that shows you how to create and sell your first online course. It’s called Teach Your Passion.

9. Membership Site

When done correctly, membership sites can be a great source of recurring income. It can bring financial stability to your online business as customers pay you monthly. You’ll need to think through a content creation strategy as most members of a membership site expect new content monthly. But once you have a realistic plan, you’ll be glad you created a membership site.

10. Coaching/Mentoring

If you are new to blogging or building a platform, opening up mentoring spots is incredibly easy. Your audience would love to be able to learn from you directly. You will need to keep in mind that you are trading time for dollars. To be effective with this income stream, you will need to charge what you’re worth. To see an example of how to set one up, check out my blog mentoring page for ideas.

11. Physical Products

With a service like Kunaki, you can easily convert any digital product into a physical product, like a CD or DVD. They will even drop ship your product directly to your customer so you do not need to worry about carrying physical inventory yourself. It’s as simple as uploading your artwork cover along with your audio or video file. You can then tie it into your website and allow your audience to purchase physical products from you.

12. Paid Webinar Series

While free webinars are an important strategy for me, when done right paid webinars can be a great source of income as well. This allows you to receive up-front payment before you create the content. You’ll then jump into an online teaching environment with your students and teach them. It’s similar to hosting a live workshop without the required travel.

13. Keynote Speaker

Another great source of revenue is speaking before live audiences. As a blogger, you have plenty of helpful blog posts, podcasts, and webinars that can be easily converted into keynote talks.

All you need to do to get started is to create a speaking page on your blog and have a way for event planners to reach out to you. If you’ll go through the process of creating a framework that I’ll share with you later, you’ll have plenty of great talks that will lead to many ancillary sales.

14. Workshop leader

Why should I waste my effort in planning in-person events if I can do most of this stuff online? That used to be my thinking for a long time, but my mind is changing. You will find that there will always be a segment of your audience that are “event goers.”

Instead of buying online courses or even paid webinars, they much more value learning from you in-person along with the added bonus of connecting with others and the chance to just get away.

Let me be clear. You don’t have to do all fourteen of the above strategies to be successful. In fact, I’ve made the majority of my income in the past with just online courses. However, if you want to scale your business to reach more people, you’ll need to repurpose your message into many different formats.

Jonathan has been blogging since 2009 and is still in awe that the Creator of the Universe desires to have a relationship with him. His passions include spending time with his kids, reading, March Madness, surprise get-a-way trips with his wife, and watching funny YouTube videos.

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I did a few early on in my blogging career. However, I am personally not a big fan of them. It has the potential to slant the blogger’s opinion because he is being paid to write the post. Unless he has courage to point out the good and the bad.

http://www.billeebrady.com/ Billee Brady

Hey Jonathan,

What is the favorite way I like to earn an income through my blog? That would have to be driving targeted traffic through my sales funnel where I take my leads through a process of not only teaching but recommending tools and resources that allows me to make multiple income streams on complete auto-pilot.
Blogging is da BOMB!

Billee Brady

Anonymous

Thanks Billee. You have a good grasp of the essentials. Keep it up!

http://MyFreeSurveys.info/ http://www.MyFreeSurveys.info

Guys, the easiest way to start making money online is to make marketing research (also called “paid surveys”).There are many companies that need your opinion, and these companies will pay you for your time.You son’t need absolutely any skills.You will make $5 to $25 per survey.One problem with the most surveys is they charge you registration fees.I don’t see any reason to pay.I found one good and legitimate survey site, that is 100% free.

So all you have to do is to click the link in my profile (at the top of my post) and to register.Believe it or not you can make $30 today.Just do it.It’s 100% risk free.

Anonymous

Great article,

While I was looking for a way to start making money online, I friend of mine told me that I can start working from home and to make $3,000/mo.I didn’t believe it, but I tried.I couldn’t believe when I saw my first payment …$460 for only one week were into my paypal account.LOL!

If you want to make money like me, just click on the link in my profile (at the top of this post) and register.Registratinon is 100% free.Work is easy and it does not require any skills…Everyone can do it.You can start making money from home today …

http://www.jaysonlinereviews.com/ Jay Orban

The best way for me to make cash blogging is definitely through affiliate marketing, seo, and listbuilding from my blogs.

Oh and a lot of 100% unique content.

Anonymous

I completely agree. Unique content is king in my book. Jonathan

http://cashadvancesus.com/ cash advance

Great tips and recommendations on blog monetization. Monetizing my blog I am currently focused on such methods as selling Ad space and affiliate programs. These methods seem to work perfectly for me. I would definitely make use of your advices and will try other methods, which I found in this post. Thank you.

Anonymous

Thanks for stopping by!

BloggingYourPassion

JZ, There are some advertisers that pay just to have their ad shown. It doesn’t have to be clicked on. If they are paying $5.00 per 1,000 views, then you are making a $5.00 CPM.

http://harounkola.com/ Haroun Kola

thanks for this blog post. i’m focussed primarily on sports betting, forex, and i’m starting my own membership site, where i help people one by one set up their own affiliate marketing programs.

jmilligan

Thanks for stopping by.

http://www.facebook.com/belton.bass Belton Bass

Fantastic post, Awesome Site. Big Thanks for sharing! I’m a newbie. Blogging is a whole new world for me. Yesterday I came across a company offering all of the online social media stuff for one price. Should I stay with what I’ve got, or move over. I’ve checked them out they are legit – I bought it but can’t believe the prices.

I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, I’d just like a second opinion http://maxout.gogvo.com/ then go to marketing tools.

What do you think?

Girish Jois

The first useful stuff that I found, on this topic; thx a lot indeed.

Sandi

hi,
Can you help me set up a blog? I m new to blogging.

afabluo

Wow. Thank you, Jonathan!

Maria Morgan

Great list of strategies, Jonathan! Appreciate your wisdom and insight on this topic – as well as your obvious passion for the One who gave you the ability to do so in the first place: “. . . still in awe that the Creator of the Universe desires to have a relationship with” you. God bless ~

http://Firsthandfarewell.com David Morrow

Jon, I have actively sought for a way to get from A to B, as usual I was asking the wrong questions. Thank you for some rubber meets the road stuff! I emailed you. I am glad yet often frustrated by the fact that everything happens in its time and that you are amazed by some of the same things I am. Here’s to living the “mustard seed dreams” -dmorrow

Evalynn Barrett

Thank you so much for giving such terrific information! You answered my questions in my first click! 🤗

Wander the Arctic

thank you so much for your tips! I find these extremely helpful.

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